In June 1950, the Minister of Education Taha Hussein created the Supreme Council for the Universities (SCU). With the growing number of universities in Egypt, he argued the council was necessary to coordinate between these institutions, and oversee their policies and procedures. Facing resistance from the universities, which refused to report to the SCU, however, Hussein abandoned his project. Nevertheless, following the purge of the universities whereby faculty considered a threat to the regime were fired, the SCU was re-created in October 1954. Hussein’s initiative was criticized for rendering the universities vulnerable to the politics of the Ministry of Education. It came as a surprise: as a professor in 1932, he suffered the ministry’s unilateral decision to transfer him to the department of elementary education. My paper will argue, however, that this initiative was consistent with Hussein’s larger project for culture and education in Egypt. His goal was to build strong educational institutions requiring substantial support from the state. This paper will show how the secular university was at the heart of Hussein’s project. In his view, the university, with its “modern” research and teaching methods, was the only institution capable of training the nation’s “intellectual leaders” to formulate its problems and create an educational system corresponding to its needs. Without such an education, he believed no democracy or full independence could be achieved. Furthermore, I will argue that despite Hussein’s dissatisfaction with Egypt’s multiparty system, he predicated the proper functioning of these institutions on the existence of a democratic system whose checks and balances kept the government accountable. To overcome partisan politics focusing on short-term political gains, he proposed supreme councils focused on long-term policymaking and run by expert technocrats sheltered from the rapid turnover of political power. Using archival material from Dar al-Wathaiq, Cairo University, and Hussein’s private records, this paper draws on Hussein’s life as a civil servant to investigate the ways in which he negotiated the implementation of his ideas on education. His decisions and debates reflect not only the flaws of Egypt’s volatile pre-1952 political system, but also serious attempts to engage the public in policymaking using a relatively free press and a commitment to a certain level of transparency on the part of government officials. Moreover, by telling the story of the SCU, now a symbol of state control of the universities, I aim to question the presumed rupture between “liberal” and “Nasserite” Egypt.